Vreeland. "Also small stones, small
straps. It would be interesting, and Diane
de Mere, etc., . . . The marvelous sum-
mer look," some computer-generated
Vreelandisms read. Although the proj-
ect is amusing, coming up with non-
sense is the one thing with which hu-
mans need no help.
Still, these behavior-patterning ap-
proaches produce insights when applied
to the Enron corpus. A pair of research-
ers at Queen's University, in Canada,
had some success applying "deception
theory": the idea is that disingenuous
e-mailers tend to minimize first-person
pronouns, use more negative-emotion
and action words, and write with "an ex-
cessive blandness." Their search turned
up a number of misconduct-related
e-mails, although further analysis was
still required as a final filter.
Other projects got more specific. A
study from the University of Wash-
ington crawled through the e-mails to
see how tonal formality tracked onto the
nature of a message, rank di erence, so-
cial familiarity, and the number of recip-
ients. Most results were unsurprising:
people e-mailed more formally when
dealing with business, across a gap in
rank, with people they scarcely knew, and
to a bigger audience. Oddly, though,
e-mails grew more informal as the list
of addressees expanded beyond ten.The
researchers hypothesized that people
like to strike a slouchy pose before big
workplace audiences, the better to seem
the cool kid in a class of dweebs.
In the way that years have springtimes,
most epistolary careers have a swell.
Maybe yours came in July, at camp, when
. . felt like a lonely hour. Maybe it
started in the season that arrives after a
failure or a death, or in the crisp eve-
ning that closes a lucky day. Mine ar-
rived when I was a college exchange
student in France: four classes, few
friends, and a shared apartment across
from a fire station where, most morn-
ings, pompiers paraded out onto the side-
walk to unroll, and then reroll, their
hoses. I would go to a creaking amphi-
theatre to watch a lecture by a preen-
ing giant of French literary theory. I
would continue to a small room where
a scholar with a prim, babylike mouth
read verbatim from an outline, which
the students dutifully copied onto pris-
tine quadrille paper using fountain pens.
At lunchtime, I'd sit in the park with a
. sandwich and write letters across
the tops, bottoms, and backs of greet-
ing cards, descanting on random but---I
believed---revealing details.The French
magazines photographed intellectuals
in odalisque poses, I'd report. The sta-
tions on the Clignancourt-Orléans line
smelled like baking yams. When I think
back on this period, what strikes me most
is how fresh my flint was, how the light-
est brush with a larger world could scat-
ter sparks, smoke up my eyes, burn
through hundreds of words. My e-mails,
horrifyingly, would run longer still.
The Enron corpus seems unburdened
by such correspondence. "Where are you
right now? i am in london," Greg Whal-
ley, the company's president after Je Skill-
ing's departure, wrote a colleague inquir-
ing about a meeting. "Congratulations!
Keep up the good work," Teb Lokey, a
manager for regulatory a airs, tells an
employee. (That is the whole message.)
An analyst found about half of the e-mails
to be one sentence long, and those that
run on aren't always more substantive.
When the Enron corpus first became
available, some people described its
catalogue of tics and corporatese as
"cliché"---less embarrassing to Enron,
possibly, than to the species. (Who
among us has not stood atop millennia
of human language and, after a moment
of reflection, signed an e-mail "Best"?)
To the extent that "cliché" is another
word for recurring cultural pattern, these
platitudes are exactly what computer
analysis embraces.
In , an enterprising business-
English teacher named Evan Frendo had
the idea of using the corpus to locate
phrases helpful to the foreign business-
person working with Americans. After
what must have been punishing study,
he discovered a fixation on "ball" meta-
phors. "I thought I'd get the ball rolling,"
one Enroner wrote. "Sounds like you
guys had a ball at dinner," another said.
"I played hard ball and told them that I
had to have more time," a correspondent
reported. "Someone dropped
the ball here!" an employee chides. "From
June , we will be totally on the ball,"
reads an e-mail that you don't believe. "I
will pretty much leave it in your ball park
about Friday night," somebody writes (a
message that Frendo correctly annotates
"???"). All told, the corpus contained six
hundred and two instances of ball speech,
apparently covering every scenario in
modern American business. It is not clear
that this compendium eases the task of
the Danish banker on a morning flight
to Dallas. But perhaps it tells him where
to focus his study.
Naomi Lancaster, a graduate student
at Ball State University (!), established
that Enroners didn't generally open with
"It's not nepotism if I'm the best son for the job."